


He was born of belief, in an accident where the wish for his existence had chanced on exerting real power in the world.

by starlingale



Series: an alien mind formed by interaction with humans [1]
Category: The Shape of Water (2017)
Genre: Backstory, Character Study, F/M, Pre-Movie, the tribe is killed - sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-15
Updated: 2018-02-15
Packaged: 2019-03-19 04:22:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13696758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starlingale/pseuds/starlingale
Summary: Before they destroyed his life, he was a being within a context.





	He was born of belief, in an accident where the wish for his existence had chanced on exerting real power in the world.

He didn’t know exactly how he came to be. It had to do with his tribe’s beliefs, but he didn’t know if the push of their collective will has dropped some existing being in its way to a new category, or made him form just from the water and the mud. His consciousness has awakened gradually, and his body and mind had kept changing in symbiosis with the myths about him for a while, before his existence would have solidified into something with enough momentum to sometimes contradict the tales. He was more blind and aggressive when he was used to scare children to stay away from water, for a generation or so, and then he became kinder as the prevailing wisdom has changed form. He lived to inspire bravery and to protect from intruders, to impersonate the kind of enjoyment of life that the villagers aspired to, to heal… Some had seen him as the river god, and others as the river godess, so for a while he had a changeable body like a crenicara fish. (He liked the freedom of being like that, so he had kept the ability even when his image's general integration in the male cults made his gender pretty much determined from the tribe’s point of view, with the exception of the occasional follower who clinged to his changeability for personal reasons.)

As time passed, his identity become more and more stable, but even from the start, not all tales were true – his humans were able to express a pressure with their beliefs, but they moved in the dark, and there was no guarantee for any of their actions touching any of the mysterious threads and levers on the other side.

His awareness grew especially in the periods when he had been interacting with his people more. He was scary and protective in contradictory tales, but his healing powers, once discovered, never got entirely forgotten. When the people spent more time talking to him, as opposed to leaving offerings for a brief touch and disappearing, he had become the kind of thing that could understand their speech, even as no one expected him to answer, so he couldn’t. Some people respected him from afar, but some worshiped him with love, and for them, he became the kind of being who could need and feel love, on a more personal level than his bone-deep feeling of belonging to the tribe who created him.

He was born of belief, but he was existing on the physical plane too, so he had always spent a part of his time just being, hunting and swimming and enjoying the sun. The way his mind depended of, and interacted with, his body, was one of the things he would have wanted to investigate more about.

What frustrated him was when he could not help his humans – when they came to him with the kind of problems that he would have been supposed to be able to solve, but he could not, his usual magic slipping on the surface of the thing like a claw with a broken-off tip. He tried to experiment, to feel around in the dark to find the structure behind his powers, his abilities and their limits, but he barely had language for such things, and his mind had not had the right tools. He yearned for a deeper understanding, and he had learned what he could about what they knew about the world. Some of it was very informative, other ideas worked by using the levers of the realm he just identified with the tingly feeling of mobilizing it, and yet others he was able to improve, which helped him repay the time of the elders teaching him.

His tribe’s number had ebbed and flowed with better and worse years, illnesses, wars and internal conflicts. For a while the leaders became worse and worse, then the majority of people began to listen to old women in the forest, who were supposedly channeling the leaders of old days – some of them had felt tingly to him, others not, at least from the distance from where he could glance them preaching, but he was glad for them remaking the tribe’s hierarchies, anyway. He was glad for a future when he could return from his semi-exile, from avoiding the kings who seeked him out to sanctify their crowns. He liked the direction things seemed to be going to.

And then invaders with unimaginable weapons came, killed the entirety of his tribe, and in his shock and existential weakening he was unable to protect himself, too. He had fallen in their hands, became a prisoner in a tiny, moving tomb, full with foul water, and he had to grieve while being starved and regularly beaten. He had long ago became independent enough form people’s wishes that the dehumanizing gaze of his captors could not take away any of his soul, but it burnt him anyway. He tried to find his balance, to clear his mind and get into a place when he could even think about what to do now, but it was impossible in the conditions they had been keeping him.

When he arrived at the cave with the harsh lights, the torture continued, but he also could not miss the precision of some of the people’s tools – Ben had been talking while he examined him, measured him in all ways imaginable and even made pictures of his interior without cutting him in half. His pattern recognition was sharp, and he understood more of his chatter each day. In the moments when his head was relatively clear, before being made cloudy again from torture, hunger and the overexertion of self-healing, he yearned for the power of these people’s tools and theories. But what he needed the most was to be seen and recognized. He was made out of people thinking about him, and not was reduced to biological documentation with the fault of having a consciousness attached to it.

So when he had seen the eyes of the woman in blue, her kindness extended as towards a fellow being… he’d let it slip under his skin and sustain him, even in the middle of this hell. Because he needed her recognition like clean water.

**Author's Note:**

> that last simile is under construction, but having two breathing systems is a Rude Act against struggling writers in need of using metaphors related to air deprivation.
> 
> It's "choose not to warn", because a whole tribe should count as a Major Character in its death, but I didn't want people imagining that i have prematurely killed off our River God himself, at the middle of his backstory, no less.


End file.
